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YOUTHTOPIA 2020

Liceo Erasmo da Rotterdam has a proud record of participation in many E.U. awareness programmes. In the past 20 years we have in fact promoted great interest in the European Union with programmes including Comenius, Erasmus+ Projects, cultural exchanges and last year one of our classes was selected to take part in a Euroscola Day at the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

This year our school was lucky enough to be awarded a grant to take part in a new Erasmus+ project which will take place over a two-year period.

Erasmus+ provides European schools with funded opportunities to engage in international activities with lasting benefits for both teachers and students, enhancing international cooperation and fostering innovation in education.

Working with schools from different countries also gives students and teachers the opportunity to practice foreign languages and increases their motivation towards language learning.

As far as pupils are concerned, the project also aims to significantly increase their sociocultural competence through structured study visits to the partner schools.

Also Staff in each of the partner schools will have the opportunity to travel and experience other educational systems first hand by visiting classes at each of the 4 transnational meetings.

The new project stems from previous Comenius Projects and started with a Preparatory Meeting held at our school last year in November . A new school has joined the original team and the present partnership includes schools from Bulgaria, France, Spain, The Netherlands and Turkey.

The title of the two-year project is “YOUTHTOPIA 2020” and stems from the term “Utopia”

In Greek Utopia means “No place”. For this reason it has usually been defined as an ideally perfect place which in real life is very difficult to achieve, an imaginary world where social justice is achieved as well as the principles that could guarantee it (as in “Utopia” by. Thomas More). Utopia thus symbolizes people’s hopes and dreams.

YOUTHTOPIA, as a result, refers to the perfect world, as imagined by our students

For the duration of the project, the students of the 6 partner schools will work together on this common theme

With their history teachers they will read some pages from Thomas Moore’s “Utopia” and learn about both failed and successful utopian projects and during the English lessons they will deal with utopia and dystopia in English literature. Other teachers will cooperate dealing with some aspects related to the theme of the project

As the project includes 4 transnational meetings each time the emphasis will be on different aspects:

Education

Employment

sustainability

fight against social exclusion

Before each meeting the students will be involved in research about the chosen aspect, they will discuss possible problems, trying to work out solutions and to imagine and explain what a perfect community means to them.

They will exchange materials and ideas also through etwinning, an online community of schools that provides a forum for staff and students to collaborate across borders

During the meetings they will exchange ideas with their partners and together design their own utopian world by creating both a virtual city using innovative technology and a physical model .